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Somehow I observed other people's emotions and behaviors as much as I absorbed their emotions especially fear. I watched people. For I knew that what appeared to be the reality was very deceptive. I knew this intimately. Knowing how people felt when they had not verbally expressed their true feelings created some guilt on my part for knowing and a belief that I was somehow responsible to accommodate or take care of their unexpressed feelings and needs, and I surely could anticipate those feelings and needs.
I believe we are all here to burst out of fears that block us from discovering and growing into who we really are divine loving children of God. We don't do it for someone else. We do it for ourselves. Yet in doing so, our healing uplifts the world because we have an effect on one another. Many people are realizing that inner peace must be achieved before we can accomplish world peace. I know in my heart that this is what the great prophets were attempting to teach us. How we do that within our lives varies based on what we are here to work on.
I experienced a personal unveiling or vision when I was nineteen years old that cracked the shell of my reality. I had a waking vision in a discovery of knowing that reality was so much greater and beyond our own small view of the world. The veil we lived under on earth was the one where we believed that we had no individual purpose, power or connection to anything. The veil was the collective consciousness in illusion. At that time, I referred to us as "puppets" on a stage of the third dimension in what we believed to be complete reality. Behind the veil of our own illusions, we were being observed and guided. We were absolutely not alone. And I also knew the greater part of my totality, my soul, was a part of that greater reality behind the veil, with an aspect of myself planted here on earth to specifically do something. That was too much for me then. I couldn't integrate the knowledge and it frightened me to the core because I didn't have anyone in my life at that time I could clearly relate to about it. It wasn't until many years later that a spiritual teacher, Brook Jasmyn, identified that experience as a "crisis in consciousness. " I had previously done everything to forget it and tried to sink deeply into the material world. Well, to no avail... I began observing more and more. I began having deeper insights later in life spiritually. What was my role, our role as humans on earth? Fear could not be removed from those inquiries. "You can run, but you can't hide" sums it up. I did, after all, try... Don't we all?
Over the years, I began developing a perspective concerning our relationship with fear within the steps of my healing journey, and through conversations with people during my travels and in the different places I lived. When I realized that I was going to write a book about fear several years ago, I knew that the idea of fear was not just an intellectual one. I realized its roots are purely spiritual. The intellectual and the spiritual are interwoven. I also believe that our own inner process of healing is the road to cleansing our fears one reason why we are here on earth. When we heal our fears, we automatically bring compassion and our authenticity into the present.
I want to provide a format that I hope will help simplify the complexity of fear by deciphering types of fear. In that way, there is a simpler base to work from. I believe this is one we can teach our children to identify and work with.
Fear, in its basic, true form, is an instinctual survival mechanism among most living things. This instinctual fear is an adrenaline or chemical response to impending personal harm or death to prepare us to run or defend ourselves. We can learn this much in school. The source of this type of fear might come directly from a person, or other living source that threatens our life, or originate as a natural occurrence, like a tornado.
We have evolved into a fast-moving, technological, and integrated communicating world. Human beings carried this basic reflexive emotion, which I call "original" fear, from our historically simpler lives and have evolved it into a venomously complex and sophisticated mechanism. The type of complex fear that is a spin-off from original fear will be referred to in this book as "evolved" fear. The source of most evolved fear is the human being's disconnection or perception of a lack of something. The result of this lack down through the ages has been to take control over, take power from, deceive, and repress oneself and others, in a multitude of ways. Working with and understanding evolved fear is the main focus throughout the book.
We can create the illusion of power over others by the use of fear and it is fear that actually motivates someone to want to overpower others. We have become unconscious of the fear propaganda that saturates us, and the blind paralysis we have adopted by believing or complying with so much of it. In other words, we have given up and turned over much of our own personal power to someone or something else. We have looked outside of ourselves to validate our goodness and find acceptance, and we have looked outside of ourselves in search of purpose and happiness. We should be looking within to discover our personal truth, our own personal power. We cannot gain by taking from another. We can only become powerful and free by empowering ourselves and then support others in freely doing the same.
Certainly the family we are born into, the cultural tribe or community we are raised in, friends, school, religion, work, the media and other sources, are the training grounds that shape how we view ourselves and the world around us, and ultimately the fears we absorb. We do take fear on, but I believe that there is that knowing or natural filter in each of us that knows something is not positive or good for us if we take the time to inquire within. Taking action in the face of that knowing can become the spark that ignites a very basic honesty the discovery that goodness or rightness is a catalyst for forward motion, love, growth, and positive change for everyone. The opposite of taking positive action is negative fear, which creates paralysis, stagnation, distortion and struggle.
There are the fears we believe we resisted, or consciously don't believe in, yet act out, not realizing they are only disguised on different stages with different actors. There are the fears we resisted and didn't carry forward. I recognized years later that what I had experienced in the vast majority of cases throughout my life was the result of someone else's projected evolved fear, including my own version, only to be recycled through me with the promise of it being passed on again to someone else.
Do you feel as if you're going to come to great harm or die if you face some fears? A part of us automatically kicks into harm-extinction original fear mode, without even being conscious of it. This is an automatic defensive reaction, but it's not the reality when we are dealing with most evolved fear. The fight or flight response we feel has a place only when we truly are in danger of injury or death. Once we know that this automatic response is a part of what is triggering us, we can realistically and much more calmly confront the problem.
Another person can ignite original fear in us immediately by threatening our well being. Those attacking, either emotionally or physically, carry fear within and try to create power over us to falsely regain their own power. Knowing that perpetrators are acting out of fear of powerlessness in their own lives helps put this into perspective, and also helps us to realize a greater self-worth and integrity - the road to getting our personal power back.
Why is it some people heal their fears while others don't? What prohibits people from positive action in their lives? I would like to propose that a great part of the process enabling us to eliminate evolved fear happens in a two-fold way. First, through faith and active relationship with our greater power God, Great Spirit, Universal Source, Allah, Nature, Creator, whatever you wish to call "It" is an infinite compassionate and gentle energy that is supporting us every moment. We cannot be, and have never been, alone! This Higher Source has always been within and around us, and is a part of us. It is within everything. It can never be separated from us, except in our mind. I'm talking about our soul and natural connection with The Divine. Consciously tapping into this basic spirituality gives us a tremendously expanded consciousness. The result is to know and see the world from a vast, infinite level, rather than a confined and limited one, no matter who or where we are. We can begin to see the unity in everything. Second, is the fact that we have the power of free will or choice. To create real change requires a conscious, willful decision. To do so requires action. Change requires practice and courage. We can wake up and reprogram ourselves. And we never have to do it alone!
Become a seeker of personal truth by choosing to search within, to determine whether that which comes to us from the outside passes the test of our never-failing inner spiritual relationship to our truth with God. Realizing that we have free will to be powerful individual beings who can move away from fear, the greatest illusion, becomes our greatest power, and can bring us into a more wondrous way of being perhaps a true human "becoming”...
More Excerpts. . .
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